Tiny Furniture

source: Tiny Furniture

Young woman comes home after graduating from college and tries to get her life together as she deals with her mom, her sister, some friends and two potential boyfriends. Inde darling film is both much better than I expected but not as good as I hoped. Don't get me wrong its a good movie and worth a look, I just was bothered by a few things. First up some of the performances are uneven. Lena Dunham who wrote, directed and stars in the film is good, but erratic in her performance, I think largely because she's doing too much. The guy who plays the slacker who latches on to her an leaches from her for a couple of weeks is so dead pan as to be nearly dead. The character is also so unlikable you don't see what out heroine sees in him (his philosophical cowboy is not even clever). The other people are mostly good, with Dunham's mom hitting one out of the park in every scene she's in. Another problem I have is that while the camera work looks great its rather static and unremarkable. I understand Dunham was working under constraints but it makes the film feel like any number of inde films, which it really isn't. On the other hand the script is often witty and on target (why the film isn't like many independent films recently). I really liked much of the dialog even if the drama is uneven. Worth a look

Overall I enjoyed this movie, despite the fact the story ends abruptly without a conclusion of any kind. The writer/director creates authenticity by playing the main character as a version of herself; her mom and sister play the main character's mom and sister, and it's filmed in their apartment. It's more than a self-indulgent exercise; minor characters are interesting (notably "Charlotte") and it's well written. In addition, the writer/director/lead actress shows guts by wearing no makeup in many scenes and showing herself getting dressed and showering despite being quite out of shape. There is no self-consciousness of any kind in these scenes. It is a kind of feminism. But the real reason I found this film fascinating is how it shows what's changed between my generation (late Baby Boomer) and Generation Y: "Aura," the main character, comes home from college to live with her mom and unlike the youth of my generation, has no problem with living at home. She crawls into bed with her mother when she's feeling down. This isn't an issue because her mom is single; in fact, there's no mention of a father of any kind in the entire film. No one from my generation wanted to live with their parents after college and we did not sleep in our parents' beds past the age of 8, partly because there were usually two of them, including one of the opposite sex. Aura senses that underneath her successful exterior, her mother is lonely. It's unclear who is more needy, Aura or her mother. I came away from this film convinced that the sea change of the past 25 years has been the epidemic of divorce. "Aura" pursues two men, unaware that neither of them are interested in her and both are loathsome--one has grandiose ideas about a non-existent career while mooching off of friends; another is an underachieving liar and cheat. Perhaps it's Aura's low self-esteem, or maybe her unfamiliarity with men from not having had a father or brother, that makes her unable to see these men as they really are. Perhaps she also can't see that being overweight and having low self-esteem might be barriers to finding the right man. In one scene, Aura's younger sister has a party and Aura freaks out, afraid she'll be blamed for allowing minors to drink in their apartment. In my generation the 22-year-old would never have assumed this responsibility because high school students were not considered children who needed to be baby-sat. High schoolers in the 1970s and 80s didn't refer to themselves as "kids," as Aura's family does; this term was used to describe 8-year-olds; high school students called each other "people." Aura's mother complains Aura's friend Charlotte is "unsupervised" despite being a 22-year-old adult. In short this is a perhaps inadvertently devastating portrait of current teens and young adults: Overly close with their often single moms, seeing themselves as being like children, lacking self-consciousness but also lacking self-esteem. The young men have difficulty with commitment and with respect for women (again, probably because of the divorce epidemic but perhaps also because of widespread *--references to which are made several times in the film) and the young women bond with each other while feeling confused about how to approach the increasingly disinterested and disrespectful men whom they meet. I observe these phenomena or hear about them all the time in my professional practice and seeing a dramatic representation on an intimate scale in this film was quite fascinating.

I really hate this movie. I get that Aura was meant to be portrayed as a whiny snob but it ruined the entire film for me. I harbored high hopes starting this movie but was rewarded with tantrums, pipe sex, and tantrums again. A spoiled, artsy girl with no direction feels as if she's been forced into adulthood and now must juggle finding a job and fighting for her mother's attention. I believe there happens to be only one great thing about this movie which is her mother's apartment. Of the parts I could handle of the film, I was left wondering how the mother ever managed to remember what went in which beautifully white cabinet.

Even as a fan of indie films and movies that are driven by character over plot, I found Tiny Furniture to be appallingly bad. The characters are all not only stereotypes but despicable people. The dialogue is as bad as the dialogue in The Phantom Menace. Absolutely nothing is learned by the characters, and if anything could be learned by the audience, it would be a brief, boring insight into the lives of very, very dull people. Aura, the protagonist is an entitled, self-pitying post-grad student who flounders awkwardly through bad choices and bratty behavior and passes it off as self discovery. Aura's mother fits every cliché of the rich, distant, oblivious parent who simultaneously fosters and disapproves of her daughter's bad habits. The men at whom Aura throws herself are the worst part of the film. These men are supposed to be presented to us as unique and deep--one is broke and a freeloader, but he makes YouTube videos in which he quotes Nietzsche while riding a rocking horse. The other is a cook who cheats on his girlfriend and only shows interest in Aura after she indicates she can get him pills, but--he reads novels and wears a fedora. These men take advantage of her in the most blatant ways possible, apparently without her noticing. However, it's hard to feel sympathy for Aura when people take advantage of her because she also takes advantage of others. She takes her mother's money, food, and wine without a thought and lies when confronted about it. She reads her mother's diary without permission and lets a man she just met live in her mother's bedroom while she's gone. Aura has one friend in the film who seems to truly care about her. And while Aura appears ready to do anything for her new friends who treat her like trash, she ignores, snubs, and drives away the one good friend. The plot plods through the mundane activities of Aura's days. The more mundane the activity, the harder she fails in completing it. She is constantly late for her job as a day hostess. She can't rouse herself to put on pants for half the film. She is often shot lying on the floor, even while carrying on conversations, babysitting, and showering. All in all, the film is about a lazy, self-indulgent child in the body of an adult who, for whatever reason, is unable to handle any measure of responsibility. Pretension and privilege drive the film, which seems meant to cater to the hipster/indie film crowd on the surface level, without the depth of many other films in the same genre. A depressing, cliché movie at best and an abomination at worst.

By far the worst movie I've seen this year (so far). It felt like someone is trying to make an indie hipster film because making indie hipster films are in. The acting was so so so bad. When the sisters were arguing - I thought they would break into laughter. I cared nothing for any character. They were all self-involved rude (not in a witty or interesting way either) bourgeois white people living somewhere in NYC where there you don't see two black people even in the street shots. She's home from college with no direction. Boo hoo.

This film is essentially about a young college graduate trying to figure out what she wants to do with her life. The fact that, throughout the movie, things only get more confusing for her, only adds to the realism of the film. I have read some reviews where people claim the movie is TOO pointless, or too confusing, or just generally lacking something. I understand this position, but to the people who think this, I kind of feel like they are taking the place of Aura's mother when Aura says to her mom "you never listen to me". This is a movie that requires you to heavily invest in the characters, so if you dislike them immediately, you will probably not like this movie, either. Aura is a great character, one of the most realistic characters I have seen in a while. Even though I am a male, and am nowhere near her level of wealth nor as self-depressed, I am around her age and I could surprisingly still easily relate to her. Mostly because the time when you define yourself seems so important, and yet it is mostly a time where not a lot happens. Despite her 'hard time' she is still generally upbeat and curious towards everything, because I believe her character wants to believe, like her mother says, "your 20s don't matter that much...I never think about the past". She is, however, a very vapid character. She tends to choose the wrong people to hang out with, and she is somewhat weak (I mean, she moans the whole movie that no one cares, but the one friend who truly does, she basically shafts). Yet, she is likable because she has flaws and she embraces them. We rarely see her in fits of emo pity; instead we see an intelligent, very funny young woman simply trying to escape the shadows of her family and overcome the awkwardness of young adulthood. There are flaws here, but the writing was amazing (despite a lack of plot) - the dialogue is realistic and often hilarious. The composition of shots is brilliant, and the apartment's white walls draw beautiful contrast in certain shots. And the acting was stellar considering the indie nature and family sourcing which Dunham used to make the film. It is not perfect, but it was an enjoyable experience, and I can imagine it only gets better with repeat viewings...since you know what to expect, you can focus more on the 'tiny' details that truly make up the triumph of the film.

"I'm in a post-graduation malaise," Aura to her mother Aura (Lena Dunham) and her mother (Laurie Simmons, Denham's real mom) are a generation apart, and it shows. In Tiny Furniture (a reference to her mother's collection) Aura has drifting back to mom by returning after graduation to their upscale Tribeca apartment, which her mother easily covers as a successful artist. Aura has no prospects to be so successful, struggling as she is just trying to sustain through a nowhere position as a restaurant hostess, not the filmmaker she'd like to be. While the apartment is minimalist white, sharp, and clean, Aura is heavy, homely, and slow. The honesty of not casting a hottie as most directors would is one of the film's noble features, and that this director casts herself in unflattering circumstances (Aura has her first complete sex, boring I would say, in a street construction pipe and wears ill-fitting clothes) is a sign of the realism rare in most contemporary comedies about 20 somethings. In fact, director Dunham has achieved a universality anyway because the players in this comedy aren't a whole lot different from the young sit-com residents of the last 30 years, except they all had jobs or prospects, and alas, Aura has none. I didn't enjoy the film as I had hoped because except for the pipe and some smart Juno-like dialogue at the beginning with her sister and her mom, nothing much at all happens. If you compare Tiny Furniture with Manhattan-based Seinfeld, where it's about nothing but really something, then this is a tiny comedy where shifting around the furniture still results in a boring set up.

This quiet, unassuming movie about a recent college graduate who moves back in with her mom and sister while trying to figure out what to do with her life got under my skin and stayed there. Director Lena Dunham, who also stars in the film as Aura, has a knack for putting together individual scenes that play as if nothing of much significance is happening in them, but that when put together as a whole reveal an awful lot about the lives of her characters. Much of the film follows Aura as she aimlessly hangs out with friends, meets guys, gets a job. She's awkward and maybe an easy target, but she's also sweet and harmless and easy enough to root for. She gets on her mom's nerves and vice versa, fights with her sister, and overstays her welcome in her mom's house. We've seen it all before, right? Not really. "Tiny Furniture" may be about subject matter we've seen done a hundred times, but it felt like a totally unique take on it. In fact, it's not until the film's final moments, and when you're thinking about it afterwards, that you realize the movie isn't really that much about Aura's ennui and lack of direction; it's about her relationship with her mom, a fact that's easy to overlook by the small amount of screen time the mom has. By the end of the movie, Aura's increasingly destructive and increasingly disturbing behavior seems less like a lonely girl's attempts to fill the boring hours of her day, and instead like the ever-more-desperate attempt of a child trying to force an absentee parent into taking notice of her. This is a really wonderful movie with tiny nuances in the direction and acting that set it apart from other indie films like it. Grade: A

This is the worst movie I've ever seen, and I typically enjoy movies of this nature (slower, deliberate about emotional development). I'll break it down: Dialogue - This bothered me most and was the most distracting. It was completely stilted and lacked any flow. Characters - Totally unsympathetic people. Generally underdeveloped. Plot - Post college malaise is ripe with potential for a story, yet it feels as if it is only used as a plot device to introduce the pathetic characters and their terrible dialogue. Nothing in the movie is particular funny, but it is a bit pretentious, making this movie completely unwatchable. On a side note, I have never seen Girls, but after this drivel, I hope I never do.